The final judgments are in and The Tournament of Books winner has been crowned. It was a close match, 11-6, and my vote ended up going to the winner. Go check it out. (And read both of these books, they’re great.)
And the Winner Is…
Swedish Poet Wins Nobel Prize
Tomas Transtromer, the 80-year-old poet, became the first Swedish laureate since 1974. The Nobel committee gave Transtromer the award "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." He is the first poet to take the $1.5 million prize since Polish poet Wisława Szymborska in 1996. The Associated Press called Transtromer a "perennial favorite," and indeed he has ranked high in the betting odds in each of the last several years. The AP also noted that Transtromer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him half-paralyzed but that he has continued to write. A number of collections of his poetry have been published in translation. Here are a few:
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
For The Living And The Dead
Truth Barriers
The Deleted World
Bonus Link: Solitude (I) by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Robertson
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Why Do We Care About Literary Awards?
Getting worked up about the fact that really interesting, innovative fiction so often gets ignored by awards judges is, when you think about it, a little bit absurd.
And Then There Were Six: The Booker Shortlist
The big news is that Ian McEwen's On Chesil Beach stays alive. I've heard pretty good things about the book, but I'd guess it's not winning. He's already won one for Amsterdam, and Atonement, considered by most to be his best, didn't win in 2001 (True History of the Kelly Gang took it home that year). For the slight On Chesil Beach to win the prize would seem odd. Clearly, I'm not alone in this thinking, as the bookies, who favored McEwen when the longlist was announced, now favor Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. The longlist was offered here with some excerpts less than a month ago, but since you might not have gotten around to them then, we'll offer the same with the shortlist below.Darkmans by Nicola BarkerThe Gathering by Anne Enright (excerpt)The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (excerpt)Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (excerpt)On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (excerpt)Animal's People by Indra Sinha (excerpt)
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2011 PEN/Malamud Winner
Edith Pearlman takes the 2011 PEN/Malamud award in recognition of her short stories. Her most recent collection, her fourth, is Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories.
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